The Web 2.0 Expo trade show happened last week at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. I had not originally planned to attend, but while watching Tekzilla on Wednesday night, they said that the next episode would be taped live during the expo the following day. That sounded like fun, so I went to the expo’s website and discovered one could still sign up for a free exhibits-only pass. So I did.

Tekzilla is a videocast hosted by Patrick Norton and Veronica Belmont, with occasional guest appearances by other people from Revision3. If you haven’t ever watched it, you really should go to their website and watch an episode or two. You can also pick it up in the “Podcasts” section of iTunes. There are actually two versions of the show. The first is a weekly show, about 40-ish minutes per episode, with tech news & tips, product reviews & comparisons, and so forth. They also do a “Daily Tip Show” that’s just a minute or three and which features a single quick tip.

Thursday afternoon I arrived at the show about 90 minutes before the Tekzilla event. I figured I’d walk the exhibit hall for awhile first. I wasn’t quite sure to expect as far as exhibitors were concerned. The exhibit hall is one of the main reasons I attend trade shows like this, and that uncertainty is why I hadn’t planned originally on attending this show. I do enjoy some of the conferences when I go to them, but access to most of the conferences requires a different, and usually much more expensive, registration. So I don’t usually plan to go to a show unless there are particular exhibitors that I expect to see.

At a show like MacWorld, the exhibitors are mostly showing off physical products that work in conjuntion with one of Apple’s products. But “Web 2.0” is really more of a broad concept than a particular product, so I was interested to see what sort of exhibits would be on hand. As I walked the show floor, I discovered that the exhibits fell into three broad categories:

Companies with some sort of physical product to sell.

Companies whose product is basically whatever website they do.

Companies offering a service, such as web hosting, marketing, etc.

Certainly there is some overlap with some exhibitors, but generally most fell into one of those three categories.

The companies with physical product included O’Reilly Books, a regular tech expo exhibitor who had several new titles on display at a show special price of 30% off. I picked up a new title covering the Twitter API that I’m especially looking forward to reading. I also grabbed a book titled “Everything You Know About CSS is Wrong!” that talks about the emerging CSS 3.0 specification. It’s small, but packed with good information about the new features in the new spec.

Another physical product, hereafter known as a “physprod” (Can I do that? Coin a new word right in the middle of a blog like that? I think I can, so spread it around!) was Adobe’s Flash. Strangely, Adobe didn’t seem to be showing Dreamweaver, Photoshop or other apps. Given how these are the basic tools many webmasters rely on, it seems an odd omission. On the other hand, it may also be a sign at how some companies are scaling back what they’re willing to do for trade shows like this.

Microsoft was showing off several interesting things. They had Windows 7 on display, and you could pick up a beta DVD to take home with you. They were also showing off the developer functions of the new Internet Explorer 8. In many ways, IE has always lagged behind other browsers like Firefox when it came to helping developers figure out what was what when problems arise. That all ends with IE 8, which has a variety of new functions that will help web developers solve problems quickly and easily.

Microsoft also showed Silverlight and Expression Blend 2. I’d previously not paid a lot of attention to Silverlight. My initial impression, as with many other people, was that Silverlight was nothing more than Microsoft’s attempt to do something like Flash. In large part that may be true, but the way they’ve integrated later versions with the .NET platform has some interesting implications. I plan to read more about Silverlight in the near future.

Companies whose product is basically their website included Facebook and Meetup.com. There are a few other companies where the website is the mechanism for delivering their product… If the previous category was about physprods, then I guess one would say these companies are pushing virtprods (virtual products… there I go again coining new words). Many of these companies have websites that are basically online tools for creating other websites. Squarespace is the main example that comes to mind here.

Squarespace looks like an interesting setup. At the risk of oversimplifying it, Squarespace looks similar in broad concept to WordPress, except with a web-based GUI for creating page designs, themes, and content. I’ve only played around with it for a few minutes, so I’m not going to say much more at this point except that if you’re looking to create a website you might want to check it out. I’ll be writing more about it in a future column.